As if the 2021 GPU shortage right now isn't already bad, it will actually keep on going until the end of the year. At least according to NVIDIA, that is.
NVIDIA themselves confirm that the current shortage of their high-performance GPUs isn't going anywhere anytime soon, according to a preview of the company's 2021 Q1 sales numbers.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress refers to the strong, consistent demand for GPUs that continues to exceed the NVIDIA's current supply. Despite this, however, Team Green says that they believe they'll have enough graphics cards in the inventory after Q1 to "support sequential growth."
What this means is that gamers who would want to get their hands on a shiny new RTX card will have to wait until May to try and buy a graphics card. But even then, a return to normalcy in the GPU market is still far off with current-gen "Ampere" RTX 3000 series selling for prices around 3 times their MSRP.
Much of this can be attributed to the low stocks, because cryptocurrency miners are grabbing all the latest graphics cards, which keeps driving prices up due to high demand. In fact, supply got so bad that NVIDIA re-released old GPUs from the Turing and even the old Pascal line earlier this year to try and combat the shortage. There's also the matter of high tariffs being imposed on computer hardware that's added to the insane markups in price, according to Digital Trends.
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A Successful Launch
Despite the current state of GPU prices leaving a bad taste in the mouths of gamers, however, NVIDIA's RTX 3000 series launch was very successful, allowing the company to earn a massive USD $5 billion in total sales. According to PCGamer, Ampere's sales performance more than doubled that of Turing's in the Steam Hardware Survey for the first six months of the architecture's release.
But obviously, it's impossible to find RTX 3000 cards these days at a reasonable price, which means people who are looking to build a gaming PC would have to look elsewhere for graphical power. And this is where Intel's iGPUs and AMD's Ryzen APUs come in.
Should You Go For An iGPU Or A Ryzen APU For Now?
With current-generation graphics cards being almost impossible to get without paying exorbitant prices, gamers really have no choice but to go for integrated graphics. The best choice, however, is obvious in this case: go for at least an AMD Ryzen APU.
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The fastest iGPU you can get from Intel's latest 11th gen Rocket Lake CPUs is the Xe UHD 750. TechPowerUp reveals a 300 MHz base clock and a 900 MHz boost clock, with 256 shading units. It supports DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, and even Vulkan 1.2 as well. According to Guru3D, the iGPU's gaming performance is comparable to that of the GT 1030.
These specs look quite good on paper, and performance is respectable for an integrated GPU. Provided that you play on low settings, the Xe UHD 750 can handle a few esports games such as League of Legends, DOTA 2, and CSGO. Don't expect to run the latest AAA releases on this iGPU though.
As for AMD's Ryzen APUs, you have a choice for far more powerful integrated graphics. The best one to get right now is the Ryzen 5 3400G, which features a reasonably powerful Vega 11 GPU that none of Intel's iGPUs can hold a candle to-yet.
The 3400G is powerful enough to run select AAA games like GTA 5 at an average of 60 FPS on normal graphical settings. And if you're playing easier-to-run esports titles, you'll have a very good gaming experience to tide you over until the shortage eases or a new generation of GPUs are released.
Lastly, AMD is also about to release a new series of Ryzen 5000G APUs later this year, which they claim are powerful enough to deliver playable frame rates (around 30 FPS) in some of the most demanding AAA titles of the past few years, such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey and even the notoriously difficult-to-run Metro Exodus.
We might be in GPU hell right now, but with integrated graphics options like AMD's Ryzen APUs, it might be enough to tide us over until the cryptocurrency bubble bursts and graphics cards ccome flooding the market again.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Jai Barnachia
